Dreamweaving Open Educational Practices

Dreamweaving Open Educational Practices
concept in Science to the students which has always been a time consuming
and difficult task. With the use of OER we could provide a 3D presentation for
students to learn it in a more attractive manner.
• Many of us had shared the facts about OER with our students and also included it
in their home work to ensure that they will practice at home: One such instance
is teaching Python Programming to Advanced Level ICT students; there we could
guide them to learn and practice it just by giving the instructions and materials.
It also helped students to discover many things about Python and share them at
school increasing their motivation towards self-learning.
• Finding of OER’s related to other subjects and sharing them with the teachers
who teach that subject. This act had increased our popularity in the school and
some of our colleagues had become practitioners of OER.
Challenges / frustrations
The first challenge was the unavailability or the limitations of the internet facility
at schools. Many schools had limited internet facilities which are not sufficient
even for a single PC, while some other schools did not have any facility at all. So
the members of OER team had to use their residential internet facility to proceed
further. Few months later a circular had been issued approving the purchase and
maintenance of an Internet Dongle for schools, providing a golden opportunity for
OER practitioners.
Second one was the language issue. Most of the OER were published in English and
to use that in school we always had to translate it into Sinhala. Since all the members
did not have the same English literacy level it caused a lot of problems as some
material had to be left out.
Third challenge was unsuitability of some material to Sri Lankan school syllabus.
Due to this reason we always had to revise and remix the OER’s to make it suitable
for our class rooms. In the adaptation/ integration process of OER the tasks of
translating, revising, remixing as well as surfing in search of material needed more
leisure time than the teachers had. This cause often limited adoption of OER to the
teaching process.
Fourth barrier came due to legal aspects. Because, in some web sites they have
hidden the Creative Common license under Terms and Conditions, and the team
members had to do a lot of reading and spend time to discover the Creative Commons
license type, which was not practical due to the present workload of teachers.
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